Ten Top Joomla Template Sites

Joomla comes with a few built-in templates, but people rarely stick with those. Instead, they download and install templates from the Internet. The free sites are the most popular, but don’t neglect the for-pay sites, which often have the most exciting and professional-looking templates.

SiteGround

SiteGround offers many free Joomla templates and claims to be the largest Joomla templates site around. The site offers new releases often, so check back often. In addition to offering free templates, SiteGround also offers a low-cost space to host your Joomla site.

Joomla-Templates.com

This site is for-pay for the most part (it offers a few free templates), but the templates it has are affordable — usually, about $60 for nonexclusive use. If you want a template that only you can use, the price can run about $850.

Joomlashack

Joomlashack is a well-known purveyor of third-party Joomla extensions, lessons, and templates. Its wares are high quality, and offered both for a fee and for free.

Two things make Joomlashack templates special:

They’re XHTML compliant and validate as valid XHTML

They use a lot of CSS instead of HTML tables to arrange elements.

This site is easy to navigate, boasting clear links to paid and free templates, a developer club that gives you access to all of the templates on the site (for a fee, of course,) and even a section for online training.

Joomla24.com

Joomla24.com is a jumbo site, claiming to have over 3,100 free templates. That claim may be true; the site accepts template submissions and posts those submitted templates. Although this practice means the site has many templates to offer, it also means that the quality and reliability of those templates can vary greatly.

You can see a preview of any template by clicking its Live Preview link. By clicking on the link, you open up a working Joomla site full of sample content that lets you see what the template looks like when applied.

JoomlaShine

JoomlaShine specializes in high-quality Joomla templates designed with the business community in mind. Its main offering is JSN Epic 3.0. This template is fully customizable, allowing you to configure colors, fonts, styles, and more as template parameters from the back end.

The site is also known for its Adobe Flash–friendly Joomla templates.

JoomlaTP.com

JoomlaTP.com is another template aggregator site that releases free and for-pay templates.

Template Monster

Template Monster sells templates for all kinds of software packages, from WordPress to Drupal. These templates usually cost around $65 each. If you’re interested in having a one-of-a-kind look for your site, you can also buy exclusive rights. That kind of individuality, however, is going to cost you significantly more — typically over $3000.

Best of Joomla

The Best of Joomla site is a very active one that offers discussions and Joomla resources. It ranks its templates — which are professional-quality and for-pay — by downloads, popularity, and so on. New additions to the site are made regularly, so it’s a good idea to check back often to see what new templates are available for download.

You can get a better idea of what a particular template looks like when you hover your mouse pointer over its thumbnail; a larger pop-up window appears.

JoomlArt.com

JoomlArt.com is a template club that allows members to download and use its templates. (You can still use the templates you’ve downloaded after your membership expires.)

The site has two primary levels of membership: free and paid. As you might expect, the paid level gives you access to more features. This site is an emerging resource for Magento and Drupal templates, too.

Compass Designs

Compass Designs hosts a Joomla blog, Joomla news, and professionally designed Joomla templates available for purchase. The site also has some free templates available to registered users.